Pink Ribbons, Inc.

Who? Who doesn’t want to wear zee ribbon?!

Few threats are as amorphous and frightening as breast
cancer. It is nature’s violent misogyny, sex and death bound up far too
tightly. Small wonder, I suppose, that Avon or Revlon or Susan G. Komen
fundraisers feel the need to pink these fears over with nearly
relentless good cheer—with hopeful messaging, party whoops, feel-good
merchandising and a frenzy of sincerely well-meaning
self-congratulation.

Pink Ribbons, Inc.,
director Léa Pool’s documentary about the fundraising industry
surrounding breast cancer research, devotes a lot of time to this
aesthetic disconnect. More than once, Pool cross-cuts excited cancer
walkers in pink boas with a group of decidedly less cheery terminal
cancer patients. The mood shift is indeed jarring; Pool’s point seems to
be that we have lost track of the reality of the disease. In practice,
it serves to make the largely middle-American masses who show up and
donate money to such events seem foolish in their proud sentimentalism.
Pool is careful to avoid any hint of mockery, though she is not always
entirely successful. Her real target is the corporations who use cancer
as a public relations tool, and the corporate-beholden foundations who
somewhat self-servingly put vast amounts of money into “awareness” while
placing precious little into cancer prevention research. The reason for
this is simple, according to the activists interviewed in the film:
Cancer-prevention research usually digs into environmental causes. This
makes it especially inconvenient for large corporate partners such as
Avon, Yoplait and Estée Lauder, who all make products linked to
increased risk of breast cancer.

The idea, then, is
that the high-sheen cancer-funding events exist only to perpetuate
themselves and pad their sponsors’ public image, however ardent the
commitment of those who attend them. The film makes a powerful case, if
also a somewhat diffuse one. It would probably serve its cause much
better if Pool had tracked down the actual donation and spending
numbers, rather than traffic in implication and the same sort of
down-one’s-nose pooh-poohing affected by foodies in a McDonald’s.

Such implication is
nonetheless effective. By the film’s end, the masses in pink shirts have
taken on an almost insidious or funereal quality, as if a
frilly-ribboned walk of tears. “I might be alone in this
interpretation,” says one breast cancer activist, “but when I see a pink
ribbon, I see evil.” It’s sort of a horror film in PR smiles,
flower-painted cars and pink Niagara.